Mick Hartley

A long read at Spiked from MattRidley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 – There is now very little doubt that Covid leaked from a lab:

What was the worst industrial accident in history? Bhopal in India, where in 1984, at least 25,000 people died as a result of a leak of methyl isocyanate from a pesticide plant? No, if – as most people who have examined the evidence now believe – the Covid pandemic began as a result of a laboratory leak, then what happened in Wuhan, China was worse than a thousand Bhopals. It killed around 28 million people – and was by far the most lethal industrial or scientific accident that has ever occurred.

The usual figure of around seven million dead is the confirmed figure. It's not unreasonable, given reporting unreliability, to assume that the overall fiigure for excess deaths world-wide from Covid will be significantly higher.

Why is this topic taboo? Scientists in the West have become addicted to collaboration with China. They get students and money from China. Ten British universities rely on Chinese students for more than a quarter of their income. Scientific journals get rich on Chinese publication fees. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet and recipient of a Friendship Award from the Chinese government, went on Chinese television early in the pandemic to say: ‘I think we have a great deal to thank China for, about the way that it handled the outbreak.’

Occasionally, Westerners fret about the prevalence of scientific fraud, scientific espionage and low safety standards in China, but the money is too good. Yet it always comes with strings attached. As Ian Williams details in his new book, Vampire State, Western academia has been in the habit of ‘stifling debate and parroting Communist Party propaganda in order to ingratiate itself with Chinese partners and sponsors’….

The outbreak began not just in one of the very few cities doing research on this kind of virus, but also in the city with the biggest SARS-like virus research programme on the planet.

These kinds of viruses are found a thousand miles away from Wuhan. That’s the distance of London to Rome. We know of only one animal species that regularly travelled that route, carrying lots of viruses. That animal was the scientists themselves. In the 15 years before the pandemic, they collected over 16,000 bat viruses from all over southern China and south-east Asia and brought them a long way north to Wuhan. The nine closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 at the time of the outbreak were in the freezer of the WIV.

Coincidences do happen, but when foot and mouth broke out in the UK in 2007, just down the road from the world’s reference lab for foot-and-mouth virus, people did not think it was just a coincidence. They investigated and sure enough it was a lab leak.

The experiments they did in Wuhan were crazily risky. They took the spike genes of SARS-like viruses they found in bats and inserted them into other virus backbones to make chimeras (viruses that contain genetic material from two or more sources), then infected human cells and humanised mice. In one case, the chimera virus proved to be 10,000 times more infectious in terms of viral load in the mice and significantly more lethal. That’s a gain-of-function experiment of concern….

What is more, the work in Wuhan was being done in unsafe conditions: at biosafety level two (BSL-2), most of the time. Don’t take my word for it. The head of the lab, Shi Zhengli, said so explicitly. Her collaborator, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, boasted about BSL-2 being ‘highly cost effective’. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina called the WIV’s work ‘irresponsible’. Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin called it ‘unacceptable’. Kristian Andersen called it ‘completely nuts’. Francis Collins, former head of the National Institutes of Health, could not believe it. Jeremy Farrar, formerly of the Wellcome Trust, called it the ‘wild west’.

Meanwhile scientific denial, and the refusal to hold open debates on the subject – as Ridley documents – continues still, to this day.